Fewer teenage boys are learning about the birds and bees firsthand as early as they did a decade ago.
The number of boys between 15 and 17 having sexual intercourse dropped 8.5 percent in the past decade, mainly because girls have become more assertive, according to a new study.
Girls that age are having sex as much as their predecessors did 10 years ago, but mostly with regular boyfriends, says Barbara Risman, a sociologist at North Carolina State University and one of the study’s authors. That has changed from 10 years ago, when it was easier for boys to find a willing partner because “a few `bad’ girls” were having sex with many of them, Risman says.
“It’s the same for boys of every race,” says Risman, whose study was published in Context, a magazine of the American Sociological Association. There is a slight difference among races for girls, but the study concluded that all young women have become more selective and demanding.
“Girls had been getting more like boys, more sexually active. But what’s changing now is the boys are coming down to the rates of sex the girls have risen to,” Risman says. “Boys are no longer starting sex lives in casual one-night stands. They are waiting until they are in relationships because that’s what the girls are making them do.”
This is “very good news,” Risman says, and reflects that girls, especially, are getting the message about safe sex, a major reason rates of abortion, pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease are dropping among teenagers.
“Girls are not having less sex today, but they are insisting that they have it in a relationship,” says sex researcher Pepper Schwartz of the University of Washington.
Although the girls are getting more assertive, Schwartz says, their parents aren’t.
“Parents don’t want to deal with sexuality in their children,” Schwartz says. “Parents need to learn how to deal with information that may be hurtful to them so they can have dialogue with their children.”
The study analyzed data from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s youth risk behavior survey of more than 10,000 high school students nationally, plus other sources.
Among other findings:
– The number of boys and girls 15 to 17 who say they had engaged in sexual intercourse dropped from 54.1 percent in 1991 to 48.4 percent in 1997.
– The number of sexually active girls fell from 50.8 percent to 47.7 percent.
– Overall rates of sexually active high school students fell from 50.1 percent to 43.7 percent for whites, from 81.5 percent to 72.7 percent for blacks, and from 53.1 percent to 52.1 percent for Hispanics.
– Rates for boys declined in all three groups; rates for white and Hispanic girls remained relatively stable, but the rate for black girls fell 7.9 percent, suggesting they feel more empowered now to decide, Risman says.
– Education seems to be the catalyst for more assertive sexual attitudes by girls, Risman says, even though most public school policy still stresses abstinence and doesn’t allow much talk about sex.
